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New Scientist Live

Competing claims pile up around new element 113

JAPAN seems poised to claim its first spot on the periodic table with the creation of new element 113. But a team in Russia is also seeking approval for similar results and may yet bag naming rights.

The heaviest known naturally occurring element is uranium, with atomic number 92. All elements with higher atomic numbers must be produced by smashing atoms together to create larger nuclei. Super-heavy elements are difficult to pin down because they quickly decay into lighter elements. By observing decays that emit alpha particles – combinations of two protons and two neutrons – researchers can work backwards up the chain of decay products to identify the starting atom.

On 27 September, a team led by Kosuke Morita of the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science in Wako, Japan, announced evidence for element 113, created by shooting zinc ions at high speed into bismuth foil (Journal of the Physical Society of Japan, doi.org/jfx).

But Yuri Oganessian of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, says that in 2003 his team used calcium and americium to produce element 115, which then decayed to 113 and lighter elements.

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That result was deemed inconclusive by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, which jointly rule on evidence for new elements. Since then, though, Oganessian claims that the JINR team has produced many more atoms of 115, and has made five different isotopes of 113. Both teams’ claims must now undergo a lengthy approval process.

Confirming a method for producing these elements could bring us closer to the “island of stability”, a predicted set of very heavy elements that might remain stable for decades.

Confirming a method for making element 113 could bring us closer to the ‘island of stability’